Action VS. Knowledge
Action VS. Knowledge
A part of our Better Thinking Process and shifting your mindset to that of a CEO is thinking like a person who runs a business, and not works in it. By clearing your mind, you eliminate these ways of thinking that sabotage your success. Thereby setting yourself up to find success that you would have otherwise missed. We simply call these self-sabotaging ways of thinking: limiting beliefs.
The Limiting Beliefs:
- Tech vs CEO
- Belief Roadblock
- Delegation Aversion
- Action vs Knowledge
How to Delegate
Giving up a task and handing it off to a staff member is hard for some business owners to do. The worries are multiple: the staff member will do it incorrectly, produce poor quality, or worse damage the reputation of the company. It is no wonder that small business owners are resistant to handing off tasks, but if you grow you cannot sustain this way of management. You need to learn how to delegate once you grow and sometimes is the very first step to growing your business.
Perhaps you are an owner who is pivotal to your organization, while this may be a necessary evil as you start the company, it quickly becomes a problem when trying to grow. Realize that at bigger plateaus of business growth you will need more staff and more therefore delegation of tasks within the business.
An owner who controls it all, creates two problems, one, everything needs to go through you, and without you, the business stalls. And two, you can only manage so many tasks and staff effectively before quality suffers because of a lack of time. This is not to mention the stress and burden you bare as the sole operator of your business.
Before you can delegate, you need to learn to let go, and you need to learn how to accept something as only being 80% completed. Let go of the feeling that you need to get something perfect and accept the practical and functional version of something.
This letting go will be hard if you were a technician, and now a business owner, because you are always used to finding the answers to your problems. However, running a business is not like fixing a furnace where the solution is always achievable. In business, nothing is black and white, and most decisions are a blend of risk and educated guesses. This is why at The Service Strategist we will always say nothing is guaranteed in business; there is always an element of risk.
Now that you are willing to delegate tasks within your business to other staff members, you need to decide what tasks you will hand off to them. The method we suggest you use is a grid where you evaluate tasks according to passion and knowledge and then hand off the ones you do not like or know how to do. We call this grid the Competence/Passion Chart.
action vs. knowledge
The three terms knowledge, action, and delegation are interconnected and happen in sequence. You will always need the knowledge before you can act, and once you have decided to act you then decide to whom you will delegate the task. Each of these steps can become a limit on your mind if you do not approach it appropriately, so let’s run through it.
Knowledge
Knowledge of a task is perhaps the most important part of acting on the task. The time behind acquiring certain areas of knowledge is vast, for example, to learn marketing practices you will need at least a year of dedicated study, and certification programs take at least 3 years to finish. The same can be said for accounting, and something like written communication is arguably a lifetime pursuit.
Action
The action part of a task also takes up a lot of your time and in some cases, this may be a daily task. If we return to the example of marketing and select for running a successful Google Ads Campaign, simply know it takes a lot of time to manage. Between tweaking, adjusting, and posting to a website and social media channels, it takes a lot of man-hours to effectively milk as many leads as possible from Google Ads. Once you consider the knowledge and action required for a task you come to see delegation as the only choice.
Remember there are three things a business owner must always know at any given time, where their marketing stands, their sales, and the budget that funds those two things. While these can be delegated to a skilled member of your organization, an owner should always be monitoring and in contact with those left in charge of these two critical aspects of your business.
Delegate
Whatever you choose to learn, whomever you delegate something to make sure you act. Regardless of whom you choose to run your sales or marketing, look for someone you can work with who has a balance of the skills needed and has independent decision-making skills. There is never going to be the perfect person for the job. Worry about polishing things over time, but at first, focus on getting the thing off the ground, to begin with, and taking things off your plate.
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